Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday March 31, 2011 @06:09PM
from the you-mean-a-google-doodle-isn't-enough? dept.

cygtoad writes "Today marks Robert Bunsen's 200th birthday. I found this interesting factoid on the man: 'Bunsen and Desaga did not apply for patent protection on their burner and it was quite soon that others began to produce their own versions. Some even went so far as to claim the invention as their own, including one person who was granted a patent on the device. Both Bunsen and Desaga were involved in writing letters to the proper authorities to refute these claims.' Does anyone have an older example of such an open information pioneer? In my book he deserves some honor." Benjamin Franklin famously chose not to patent the design of the stove that bears his name, too; you can read all about it.

When you have a system where you can actually make more money suing for patent infringement and protecting "intellectual property" than you can for actually creating a product, what do you think businesses will do? It probably wasn't the case back then.

Actually Zeus was ok with Prometheus using fire for his own personal use, but then Prometheus decided to make fire available to mankind through torch-to-torch networks, and he got hit by a massive distribution judgement.

No, it was George Flint, a young man from Wales. The lore is that he was banging rocks around 842BCE, and sparks flew, catching his little pile of pine needles on fire. George ran to Uck, who said, "do it again". Bang, George went. Uck killed George, then claimed to invent fire and got 72 virgins. Uck's decendants include Edison and Sarnoff.

No, it was George Flint, a young man from Wales. The lore is that he was banging rocks around 842BCE, and sparks flew, catching his little pile of pine needles on fire. George ran to Uck, who said, "do it again". Bang, George went. Uck killed George, then claimed to invent fire and got 72 virgins. Uck's decendants include Edison and Sarnoff.

Obvious nonsense. It's never dry enough to light anything with a flint in Wales. Besides which if a welshman invented fire it would be much more likely to involve friction and wool than flint and pine needles.

Everything was not patented, but not open source. People were motivated to keep stuff closed source (well you know what I mean). Patents were invented to stop the problems that this caused: people developed some awesome new way to do something cheaper and better, but then kept it a secret (closed source) so only they could profit from the final product. And if the info wasn't shared before such person kicked it, the knowledge was lost.

I hate patents as much as the next guy, they just didn't end open source.

I have to wonder if Bunsen didn't patent the burner because of ideology or did he just screw up. There are countless examples of people not patenting stuff due to sheer naivete. Now we have 2 options:1) Research the story*, get the details and see what his opinions about the subject were. OR2) Forget facts, the guy is a open-source god!

I would admit that the Wikipedia article says that "On a point of principle, he never took out a patent.". However, there is no citation there, and if anyone can find a bette

If the open source crowd was to do what these guys did they would release their code as public domain. This is not the same. Stop trying to hang your little label on every other thing that comes along.

Unless the dictionary in question is up on its jargon, I doubt it would be useful. Open source movement has been about the source code being open and available for everyone to see. Source code didn't exist in the time of Bunsen.

Dozens of people around the world contributed to the early development of powered flight, and even though the Wright Brothers were (probably) first, their excessive and draconian use of patents ensured their work was largely irrelevant to the development of the aeroplane. A lot of other people shared what they learned, which is why many of their machines quickly started to look like our modern idea of an aeroplane rather than the tail-first pusher-prop wing-warping monstrosity that was the Flyer.

I thought Michael Faraday [wikipedia.org] came up with the original gas laboratory burner. Bunsen merely improved on the design. I guess, like the telephone or television, no person can claim to be the sole inventor.

There is a nice story about that in the "Science of Discworld" series. Contrary to what you would expect from the title, these books are about our real science. The Discworld is just used as an outsider standpoint to look at our science.

I can often whistle a tune after I've merely heard it--that doesn't make me a composer.

I would argue that the simple, obvious-in-retrospect, inventions are the hardest. Complex inventions are frequently piles of simpler things organized in a new way. The stirrup, by contrast, is almost painfully simple,and is trivial to duplicate once seen, but men rode horses for some thousands of years before some gifted inventor thought of that simple, ground-breaking device.

Although not pre-dating Bunsen, my favorite, and explicit anti-patent inventor is Jagdish Chandra Bose, benefactor to us all in so many ways. He even proved that plant and animal tissues are have parallels to one another.

There needs to be an "anti-patent" that you can file that says "I invented this first, but I choose not to patent it". Something that would be legally binding and prevent later patents from people who look for things and ideas without patents and then file the patents for themselves.

There is, but unfortunately it's called a "patent". You do what Google did with WebM [webmproject.org] -- obtain all the patents you can, then grant a "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable... patent license". Then it's effectively open to everyone, and cannot be patented.

Any way that enables you to prove you came up with it will do. Patent law has always included "prior art" rules: you can't patent anything that has been done before. See the BT "hyperlink" patent [zdnet.co.uk].

Which will cost you money. There you have it. You would have to file these SIRs world-wide (or the patent comes in through the backdoor via treaties with other countries). Just publicizing would not help either, as patent offices do not read all publications. So this is just another way of making the small inventors powerless and handing their imaginary properties to the big IP-warriors.

I agree with the original poster that there should be a real "anti-patent". I mean, you just do the work of the patent off

Besides being a brilliant political philosopher and theologian Priestley invented "impregnated water" but abhorred the idea of patents and the monopolies they grant. Josiah Schweppes was the dude who commercialized the product. Thank Joseph Priestley every time you enjoy American democracy, liberal Christianity, or carbonated beverages.

Am I the only one who finds the passion for celebrating the birthdays of dead guys to be somewhat inexplicable? I mean sure, he was born; so what? Most of us manage that. And he's not getting another year older anymore, nor can you congratulate him on that fact, so the idea of celebrating a birthday seems fairly pointless. If you want to commemorate a famous dead person, celebrate on a day they did something for which you particularly respect them; such as the date Bunsen first published his designs, in

So even if this would have been patented in 1855, the patent would have expired in 1875. And Bunsen could have made some money. That doesn't seem like a problem. I welcome inventors making some money off their inventions.

I contend that, if you were to abolish patents completely tomorrow, people would still want to create and invent and solve problems. The pace of innovation would not slow down but increase, because no firm could ever rest on its laurels.

The arguments that clever people do not work unless paid very highly; that people do not express themselves unless given copyright protection; that people do not invent unless they can win a patent - all these arguments are oft repeated and rarely proven. IME all the cleverest people want is an environment where they can dedicate their time to their art.

Yes, because most of those 19th century scientists were either of upper or upper middle class birth which is why they could devote all their time to science. Very few of the greats were of working class status.

the point is - free exchange of ideas, has ALWAYS spurred technological progress more than anything else, during the course of history. this has been so ranging from the more freely speaking and exchanging society of ancient greece, to the maritime trader cities and nations in middle ages, to scientific age.

feodalization in the form of allowing ownership of ideas and concepts to parties, kills that fundamental of societal dynamics. and nothing can bring it back. thousands of patents are rotting right now

yeees. and we will be unable to do anything with them for 20 years. i would like to remind you that the 15 years in between advent of internet and today has had changed the world A LOT. had it been delayed, things may have been a lot different.

No. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that having a technique or idea in the public domain or implemented in a product or service for decades has no bearing on whether the USPTO will grant a patent to somebody else for it.

But it does make the patent invalid. If that happens you can fight it. The patent offices are not equipped to search the complete internet for prior art (I don't think anyone is, since a computer is not yet able and AI's aren't evolved enough yet). They rely on making the patent public and allowing you to fight them. You do have to prove the patent holder wasn't the first. See the BT "hyperlink" patent [zdnet.co.uk] IANAL.

It makes it harder to patent yes. The trick is making sure you disclose enough details in a published form that the USPTO will easily find should someone else apply for something similar. The primary source for the USPTO is other patents and published applications.

So, basically, unless you're there the day they review the patent to rub their noses in it like a dog that shit on the carpet while you were out, they'll have no idea your invention ever existed if it's not already in the patent database.

If you don't know anything about Patent Law best to keep your mouth shut rather than make a fool of yourself. Public sales of the burner and publication of Poggendorffs Ann. Physik, 100, p. 84-5. count as prior art you idiot.

Umm, you provided no context to the comment you made in a discussion about the Bunsen Burner. If not having telepathic abilities makes you class someone as special, then you must think you're surrounded by idiots.

but under "first to file" that actually doesn't matter. If you didn't FILE you'd have to prove the other party KNEW you invented the app... "failure to file" is not a defense to suddenly finding yourself in trouble for something you were already doing. So many patents are written as "black box" documents anyway. Now that the "working model" is done away with anybody can rationalize after they see something that looks like what they might have thought of.

After a series of deadly methane explosions in British coal mines, Sir Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) invented an oil lamp with a metal mesh-encased wick, which became known as the Davy lamp. He released it without patent, and the design quickly spread. Humphrey determined through experimentation that methane only exploded at a certain mixture with oxygen, at a certain (high) temperature. The metal mesh dissipated the heat of the wick below the ignition point, which alerting the miners to the presence of methane ("fire damp") by burning at a different color. It was considered an early triumph of the application of the scientific method to a critical public need.

For a fascinating read on the era, I can't recommend Richard Holmes' recent book The Age of Wonder highly enough.

Why would you think that? Ben Franklin's comment on why he contributed the design of his stove patent free has pretty obvious roots in the teachings of Timothy about not being in love with money. Read the cited articles and seefor yourself.

The fact that this post was marked offtopic tells me that perhaps your avg SL reader ought to get out a bit more. Not everything of worth comes from the left side of the brain...

Well, perhaps if you had said what you said here in the first post, it wouldn't have seemed as off-topic. At first it just looked like one of those bots that goes around posting Bible Quotes absent context.